The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History’sElaine L. Jacob Gallery is pleased to present

Car Art/Crash

The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery is pleased to present Car Art / Crash, curated by Iris Eichenberg and Heather McGill, August 30 through October 11, 2013, as part of the fifth annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, ASAP/5: The Arts of the City at Wayne State University. The exhibition features work by Corrie Baldauf, Sarah Coates, Amber Kempthorn, Ted Noten, Farid Rakun, Tré Reising, Adam Shirley, and Richard Smith.

The stratified, masticating, pumping, intrinsic system of a car is a life form. To buy a car is an investment in a virtually living creature. The making of a car is a work of pride: a material/spiritual, almost divine undertaking. The ultimate investment, however, lies in the becoming-one-with and driving a car.

The artists whose commissioned work constitutes the ASAP/5 Car Art/Crash show confront us in different and powerful ways with our profound investment in and obsession with (dissected) cars: the gaze of a rearview mirror, the car body's sexual secretions, its electronic guts, the skin of its seats, the fetishized accessories and ornaments. How does the car grill breathe and sneeze? How does the car adorn and embody us? These are happy dead cars, flirting with us, exuding their sexiness. Cadavers, mechanical mass products filled with rust, yet organic beings provoking our desire.

The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History is a division of Wayne State’s College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts, educating the next generation of visual artists, designers and art historians. Wayne State University, located in the heart of Detroit’s midtown cultural center, is a premier urban research university offering more than 370 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 29,000 students.

For more information about this event, please contact Tom Pyrzewski at 313-577-2423 or tpyrzewski@wayne.edu.